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A comment on Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school students from 2020. Parent comment

Re:Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school st... by z2 on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @01:07PM (#18867040)
Yes, and in between the former and latter, there was also a short-lived attempt to simplify characters further [0]. It failed, perhaps because it was completely contrived, whereas the first simplification adopted many existing cursive/shorthand conventions of the time. Unofficial conventions are easier to adopt, and Japan's independent Kanji simplification scheme actually ended up with some of the same exact (simplified) characters (e.g. 與→与, 學→学, 國→国).

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...

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Re:Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school st... by house_atr on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @03:09PM (#18868315)
It should be called Phoenicianization as you know.. That's where the concept of an alphabet and linear writing system comes from.
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Re:Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school st... by FabHK on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @03:23PM (#18868459)
Writing has been invented several times independently, and AFAIK every culture that invented it made the jump to more phonetic writing (alphabetic/syllabic), at least partially, except China (well, maybe Indus valley).
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Re:Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school st... by chillacy on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @09:26PM (#18871021)
How many cultures independently invented writing? By most accounts it’s either 3 or 4 times. English comes from a long family of alphabet writers, all the way back to Sumerian writing.
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